Tag Archives: writers

More data on gender and literary prizes | Nicola Griffith at Goodreads (6 August): “[…] here are two new pie charts, following on from my previous post about what kind of book wins awards, this time on the most recent 15 years of the IMPAC Dublin Award and the Costa Novel Award. IMPAC CostaAs you can see, the IMPAC, one of the richest book prizes in the world, given for “excellence in world literature,” gives zero out of the last 15 prizes to stories by women about women—but 11 to stories by men about men.”

Why BioWare’s games inspire a unique kind of fandom | Sam Maggs at PCGamer (23 July): “the knowledge that we all feel the same passionately intense emotions for these lumps of pixels, no matter how well-written and complex they may be, gives us an instant connection—and isn’t that the best part of belonging to any fandom? We’re all in on the joke, all on the same level, and that’s what brings us together. But not all fan-created content is made completely in celebration of BioWare’s games; part of being a responsible and engaged fan is also writing constructive criticism of media we know could do better. And though not always perfect, BioWare is one of the few companies with a readily-accessible creative team that really takes note of and utilizes thoughtful, fan-written criticism. And being listened to is paramount to a fandom who dedicate so much time and emotional energy to these characters.”

Frances Oldham Kelsey, Who Saved U.S. Babies From Thalidomide, Dies at 101 | Robert McFadden at The New York Times (7 August): “[…] some data on the drug’s safety troubled Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a former family doctor and teacher in South Dakota who had just taken the F.D.A. job in Washington, reviewing requests to license new drugs. She asked the manufacturer, the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati, for more information. […] Dr. Kelsey, who died on Friday at the age of 101, became a 20th-century American heroine for her role in the thalidomide case, celebrated not only for her vigilance, which spared the United States from widespread birth deformities, but also for giving rise to modern laws regulating pharmaceuticals.”

Lost in Transition: ‘Rat Queens Special #1: Braga’ | Charlotte Finn at Comics Alliance (6 August): “Hi, I’m Charlotte Finn. I’m a lifelong comics fan and last year, I admitted to myself that I was transgender. Coming out as transgender means reassessing a lot about your life, your place in the world, and what that world’s been telling you about yourself before you even realized who you really were. In this occasional series, I’m going to be applying that reassessment to comics that feature people like me, or close to being like me, and look them over with a fresh set of eyes. Are they good? Are they bad? Are they somehow both, at the same time? In this regular series, I’ll offer my thoughts.”

How to Ensure You Don’t Hire Anyone | Morgane Santos at Medium (7 August): “A while ago I was looking for a new job, and as such, I interviewed at hella companies, from Big Names™ to tiny start-ups no one’s ever heard of, looking for the ~perfect place to trade my labor for wages~. Throughout this process, I had some hilarious interactions with companies who clearly aren’t actually trying to hire anyone. Let’s examine some of their fumbles and mishaps, and learn how to really turn people off from ever joining your company!”

Play Your Way: Women and Magic the Gathering (part 1) (part 2) | Nicole Jekich at Across the Board Games (13 July): “in April there was some internet hubbub over recent articles written by male Magic the Gathering players and their advice on how to get more women into the hobby. I have no qualms with men looking to help diversify the MTG fan base and to make official events and tournaments more welcoming. I do feel that what these articles lacked is input and experiences from women gamers. I wanted to learn more about how other women enjoy MTG – to understand, through reading their experiences, preferences, and suggestions how we as a community could help make women feel more welcome and how to bring more women into the MTG game and community. So I created a survey for women participants who used to or currently play Magic the Gathering. I asked women to answer questions about their history with MtG, the hows and whys. The survey was shared via social media and within 2 weeks, I collected 97 responses.”

Call for submissions: Instar books finction Anthology #000001 Almost Void | Instar Books (15 June): “For fiction that involves some or all of the following qualities: Privileging imaginative transformation of experience over experience directly (i.e., not necessarily memoir by other means); Concerned with atypical subject matter; Concerned with atypical emotional states (trauma, isolation, Zen acceptance, etc.); Concerned with sex; Written by people who haven’t necessarily had access to traditional means of publication by the literary establishment; and/or Funny, yet about something terrible.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

In addition to being the poetry and nonfiction editor for the literary journal Interfictions, Sofia Samatar is the winner of this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Her novel, A Stranger in Olondria, has gotten rave reviews. It won the Crawford Fantasy Award; it was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel; and it’s still a finalist for the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award. You can read an excerpt over on Tor.com.

Her short story “Selkie Stories Are For Losers” has been appearing on a lot of awards shortlists, too. It was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and the British Science Fiction Awards, and is still a finalist for the World Fantasy Awards. You can find links to more of her short fiction (and her poetry!) on her website.

Reimagining the Female Superhero | Lindsey Morris at Girls Gone Geek (June 18): “Saturday I attended a panel at Special Edition: NYC, and from what I gathered it was one of the only panels that day that was even nearing maximum capacity. The totally stellar line-up of creators for the talk included Gail Simone, Amy Reeder, Marguerite Bennett, Emanuela Lupacchino and Jenny Frison – moderated by Ben Saunders. This panel and its participants were great in every respect, and it produced some great conversations. [This] is the entire discussion prior to Q&A.”

Gale Simone to writers: Keep the hell up | Shaula Evans at The Black Board (June 17): “When the idea of an Incredible Hulk reboot came up at a recent John August/ Craig Mazin Scriptntoes podcast, their guest screenwriter David S. Goyer (who is writing the first film that Wonder Woman will appear in) called She Hulk “a green porn star that only Hulk could f***” […] Comic book writer Gail Simone, whose notable works include Wonder Woman, Red Sonja, and Batgirl, responded on Twitter. I’ve archived her remarks here because she has some GREAT and on-point advice to writers in all media about the need to “keep the hell up” with our audiences and the changing world around us.”

Keynote: Composing a Functional Community | Katie Miller at Erlang Solutions (June 16): [Video] “We know the wonderful benefits of functional programming, but when it comes to sharing the lambda love we often do a poor job. In this presentation, Katie will draw on her experiences as a journalist, workshop instructor, functional programming student and women’s group founder to take you back to that time before you knew what jargon such as monad meant, and offer ideas and inspiration for helping people of all kinds and categories along the path to FP enlightenment. Be warned, content may challenge the status quo and your mind: be prepared for code in an unfamiliar syntax.”

Female leaders are missing in academia | Tanya Fitzgerald at The Conversation (June 18): “The persistent numerical imbalance of women and men at senior levels in universities does not appear to be cause for concentrated and wider concern. […] we need to think beyond simply counting more women in by increasing their numbers. While numbers are important to create a critical mass, it is a change in attitude towards female leaders that is needed.”

Is Coding the New Literacy? | Tasneem Raja at Mother Jones (June 16): “What if learning to code weren’t actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn’t the software they write. It’s the way they think. It’s a principle called “computational thinking”.”

Too Fat to Be a Scientist? | Rachel Fox at The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 17): [Warning for discussion of harassment] “I can’t stay in a field where it seems that I’m supposed to apologize for my appearance every day. Although there’s a growing movement to promote a more nuanced model of weight loss and metabolism, the mentality that everything comes down to a lack of self-control is still pervasive in the scientific community.”

Silence is Complicity | Natalie Luhrs at The Radish. (Jun 16): [Warning for discussion of harassment and sexual abuse of children] “If you deliberately prey on vulnerable members of our community and continue to do so after you’ve been caught, I believe that you forfeit the right to be a part of our community.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

In 2009, she started Verb Noire, a small press for genre fiction featuring characters that are people of color and/or LGBT. In 2011, her first story, “Copper For A Trickster,” appeared in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. She’s been a panelist at WisCon, Arisia, and Readercon, and been a guest on the Nerdgasm Noire podcast.

As of last month, she has a new story out! Content warning for violence and sexual violence, but if you’re able to do so you should really check out If God Is Watching. It’s a gorgeously-written period fantasy about a young woman with an unusual power, and anything else I tell you about it would spoil its awesomeness so seriously just go read it.

Though she’s a talented fiction writer, she’s better known for her incisive cultural criticism on issues relating to race and gender. in August 2013, she started the #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag–a home for honest criticism of the ways white feminism has failed at intersectionality and repeatedly thrown women of color under the bus. The tag picked up steam until it was globally trending.

Together with Jamie Nesbitt Golden, she started Hood Feminism, an intersectional blog about race, gender, and misogynoir (the toxic brand of explicitly anti-black misogyny). They’ve leveraged Twitter to keep that conversation going with hashtags like #FastTailedGirls and #DangerousBlackKids.

It is so splendid when excellent people are recognized for their excellence! It’s delightful that Octavia Butler won a posthumous Solstice Award and that Connie Willis was given the Damon Knight Grand Master Award. And! I am personally over the moon that Jo Walton’s Among Others won the 2011 Nebula.

I loved this book so very much and if I haven’t already forced it into your hands, you are to imagine me doing it now: this is a geek feminist coming-of-age novel, and it is full of wonders.

A little capsule summary for people who haven’t read her work: Ursula K. Le Guin is a novelist, poet and essayist. She is best known for science fiction and fantasy, particularly the six Earthsea books (five novels and a collection of stories) set in an archepeligo world with advanced magic and pre-industrial tech; and various books set in her Hainish universe, which is a future series in which Earth, among other planets among relatively nearby stars, turn out to have all have hominid species on them, established some millions of years ago by a still existing ancestral species the Hainish, in a series of biological/sociological experiments. This has allowed her to write, for example, The Left Hand of Darkness, Winter’s King and Coming of Age in Karhide, set in a world of primates with a sort of oestrous cycle in which their bodies can become either male or female, and who have otherwise no gender or sexuality; and The Matter of Seggri, about a world on which there are about sixteen women born for every man, and men are kept apart with their role in society being purely exhibition of strength, sex, and providing sperm.

Le Guin is something of a goto name for someone who wants to make sure their list of Great Science Fiction includes something, anything, by a woman: she’s white, she has by now become a big name and is award-winning and Taken Seriously (see Guest Post by Alisa Krasnostein: The Invisibility of Women in Science Fiction at Hoyden). I… do think she’s worth reading anyway! But don’t stop there, I doubt she’d want you to.

I’ve enjoyed Le Guin’s writing for years, but here is her crowning Hoyden moment for me, in a 2001 interview by Nick Gevers, a science fiction editor and critic:

[Gevers asks] Who, for you, are the finest SF authors now writing — both your fellow feminist writers and more generally?

[Le Guin answers] First I am to list fellow feminists and then… non-fellow anti-feminists? Come on, Nick, let’s get out of the pigeonholes. If feminism is the idea that differences between the genders, beyond the strictly physiological, are an interesting subject of study, but have not been determined, and so are not a sound basis for society to use in prescribing or proscribing any proclivity or activity — which is what I think it is — then I probably don’t read any non-feminist SF writers, these days. Do you?

If I had to recommend a single piece of writing of hers, I would say that its the short story The Day Before the Revolution (probably easiest to find in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters), which probably benefits a lot if you read The Dispossessed for context first (The Dispossessed is a fine novel, so not just for context). The Day Before the Revolution was published when Le Guin was 45 years old. She wasn’t old at the time, and I am not old yet, but it is the closest I come to understanding how it might be.

From the interview with Guernica, on writing as a woman and on feminism:

There wasnâ€™t any aha! moment about feminism for me. I just kept reading stuff and thinking. My mind works slowly and obscurely, and I mostly find out what Iâ€™m doing by looking at what Iâ€™m doing or have done. Mostly I donâ€™t even do that. But when what I do isnâ€™t getting done very well, when it seems to be stuck or going wrong, that induces me to look at it. â€˜What am I doing? Why isnâ€™t it behaving?â€™ This happened in the middle of The Eye of the Heron, when Lev insisted on getting himself killed in the middle of the story, leaving my book without a hero, and me wondering what the hell? It took a good deal of backing up and pondering over what I had written to realize that Luz had been the hero all along, that Luz was the one who would lead her people into the wilderness. I can identify that as the moment when I consciously shifted from a male protagonist to a female protagonist, when the male was marginalized and the woman became the center.

Photo: Geeks at WisCon beaming with happiness after singing a song to Ursula in her honor.

Please add more links and birthday wishes in comments!

Alongside the great storytelling and stimulating ideas in her fiction, the breadth and depth of the body of her work is inspiring. Her creative work spans many years and many literary forms. She’s a translator, a teacher, a scholar and intellectual, respected all over the world.